At first there was pressure, so much pressure, squeezing in the darkness. It mounted and mounted, and finally the huge architecture of gas could take no more, and ignited - which was part of the reproductive cycle of the species - and things were rightly begun.Hydrogen to helium, helium to lithium then to carbon, carbon upwards to iron, and a miasma of of other things, baked in mothers and grandmothers all the way back to the beginning of time itself, which itself was not a beginning, only another phase shift up the helter-skelter of reality, which is stranger by far than it is possible to know.The little sun yawned, stretching out wisps of plasma a million miles long, regarding her etiolated body - a system of perhaps a dozen planets - with the first stirrings of consciousness. There were little rock planets, hot, tiny things like specks of superdense jewellery swirling around her head; and there were larger planets, gatherings of matter left over from her own body - her flesh and blood, and her ovaries, too, for like mammals, stars are born with all the eggs they will ever have. This took a hundred million years, a minute lapse of time within the cycle of such organisms, and in that time the little star blinked and looked around, and realised she was regarded by a hundred million mothers, who twinkled and whispered to her in nursery rhyme pulses of radiation, and she basked in their regard. She was new and ancient at the same time - like every living thing the Universe ever has produced - and she was warm, and knew that things were well.“Who am I?” she asked.